


we don't sleep in the daylight

by anothercover



Category: Captain America (Movies), Inception (2010), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, F/M, Getting Back Together, Idiots in Love, Partners in Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:08:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29716959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: They never should have fallen in love; Natasha had known from the beginning what a bad match they were. He’s too earnest by half, always willing to get his hands dirty but never relishing the prospect, and when he and Tony first started working together – well, Steve has a wild streak in him, a need toprovesomething, plus a love for the craft, but it was also because he had needed the money too badly to let his better angels shout down his demons. His mother was sick, his student loans were paralyzing, and by the time his mother had died and he could buy a Brooklyn brownstone with cash, loyalty had set in. He was always there to be sure that if they skirted legality, they never ruined anyone’s life and they never left a trace.Natasha does this because she likes it and she’s good at it. For her, it’s never been complicated.[AnInceptionAU.]
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Steve Rogers/Natasha Romanov, Wanda Maximoff/Vision
Comments: 10
Kudos: 60





	we don't sleep in the daylight

**Author's Note:**

> An alternate title for this fic is _no i have NOT gotten over endgame yet, i know it is obvious, but i have no plans to try i am mad about Everything and i like me the way i am._
> 
> I can't believe I wrote an Inception AU in 2021. It's February and this has already been a very long year.

  
  
  


Pepper abhors violence, even in the dreamspace, but that’s not the real reason she never comes along with their crew anymore. Besides, the thing she’s always been best at is _finding_ the jobs, the right jobs, not the actual execution of them. It’s an instinct. Pepper is discrete and knows which palms to grease, knows how to charm and wheedle and sell. She passes on any additional leads that cross her way, but if she tells Natasha she thinks one would bring too much heat, Natasha listens – Pepper abhors violence, but she also has a daughter to provide for all on her own, now, and if she tells Natasha the risk outweighs the reward, Natasha trusts her instincts.

It’s three o’clock in the morning in Paris when the phone beside her bed plays a few bars of Debussy, light and tinkling but enough to rouse her from sleep. Natasha gropes for it from under her blankets and swipes the messy tangles of her hair from her eyes. She needs a haircut. She’s needed a haircut for months, but she won’t get to it today, and probably won’t tomorrow, either. “Mmmm,” she grunts.

“This is a big one,” Pepper tells her. “Really big. How soon can you be here?”

Natasha squints at the clock on the bedside table. “Could probably get in for lunch, your time.”

“I’ll make sandwiches,” Pepper promises. They hang up and Natasha yawns, rubs the back of her neck with both hands. She never sleeps very well; hazard of work over time, she knows, but it’s still an annoyance. 

She pads out to the living room, unsurprised to see that Wanda is still awake on the couch, a blanket over her shoulders and her face turned toward the window like she’s been stargazing. Not too many constellations to make out in the middle of Le Marais, but there’s moonlight on her face and Natasha’s heart gives a familiar twist at the sadness surrounding her friend, as much a part of Wanda now as her round pretty eyes, her red rose perfume. 

But Wanda smiles when she sees her, and Natasha knows sadness is something they’ve all learned to live with. “I’ll text Rocket,” she says. “He still owes us one for the Henson job, but it may take him a few hours to prep his plane.”

They don’t drop off to sleep easily, either one of them, but they never fly commercial if the flight is longer than an hour just in case, and Natasha nods approvingly. “Go grab a shower,” she tells Wanda. “I’ll close up and call Carol. Do we know if she’s – ”

“Vegas, I think,” Wanda says. “You should catch her no problem.”

Neither of them choose to mention that they’ll still be one member short. Wanda takes her shower while Natasha cleans out the fridge, bags up the trash, tosses sheets over the furniture to protect it from sun damage. She never knows when she’ll be back, or even if she’ll want to stay when she does, but whenever she returns to any place she owns, she likes to find it the way she left it.

* * *

The engines in Rocket’s tiny plane are rattling and too noisy for conversation; Wanda pulls out her sketchbook and starts drawing mazes with her heavy fountain pen. It’s inlaid with mother-of-pearl and she only ever fills it with scarlet ink. Natasha tries to listen to an audiobook, but it’s badly narrated and she can’t keep her mind from wandering out into the clouds.

When she’s sure that Wanda is lost in her own work, Natasha rubs her thumb along her engagement ring, twisting it upside down on her finger. The smooth diamond is set on silver, shaped like a pear. She digs it into the center of her palm; nothing happens, and she exhales quietly. 

In dreams, if she applies even the gentlest pressure, the diamond cuts her hand. She does not have to be a genius to interpret how her subconscious feels about the fact that she’s still wearing it more than a year later.

* * *

Pepper still lives in the old Craftsman house in Pasadena, and when Natasha and Wanda arrive, she has lunch laid on the picnic table in her yard – salad in a big wooden bowl, a frosty pitcher of lemonade, plates set with blue cloth napkins. Darcy is already there, pushing Morgan on a swing bolted and fastened into a tree branch.

When Morgan sees Natasha and Wanda come through the back gate, she leaps off the swing from an alarming height – purely Tony Stark’s child, Natasha thinks, that is _not_ a gene she got from her mother – and rushes into their arms for hugs. Wanda laughs with real delight and lets Morgan drag her by the hand into the house to come look at her latest art projects, and Natasha joins Darcy in the shade of the tree. It’s noon and already sweltering. 

If Pepper thinks they need a chemist on this job, it really _must_ be a big one – they haven’t taken Darcy on the last two, which is just the nature of the work, but they cut her a share of the profits anyway. Tony’s policy was always _my crew is my crew_ , and there are a few things Natasha does differently now that it’s hers, but that’s one she’s held onto. She believes in loyalty. 

Darcy nods toward the house. “How’s Wanda doing?” she asks. “It’s been a hot minute since she and I caught up.”

There are no real secrets between any of them – there can’t be, when you share dreams, when you run around in each other’s minds. Natasha stopped feeling a prick of guilt about things that feel as though they should be private a long time ago, so she tells Darcy the truth. “She still brings Vision’s shade,” she says, because _that_ is a kick in the ass every time, coming face to face with a dead friend who’s just a little bit off. 

Pepper never comes along because her shade of Tony is too uncomfortably close to the real thing. He’s full of Tony’s charisma and snark, but Pepper knows him well enough to bring his vulnerability, too, his sincerity and self-doubt, and if they are all professionals who know a projection is only shade of the real thing, who have practice separating and subduing their own subconscious – they were all still snarled and strangled by grief, and when Pepper’s subconscious filled in the blanks with two decades of shared history and intimate knowledge, he was too persuasive. 

Pepper never comes along, because Tony’s shade came within a hairsbreadth of keeping her under with him, and Natasha and Steve both were nearly trapped trying to drag her away in time to ride the kick. 

Wanda was worried that she would become the same kind of liability, and for Wanda, it would have been a dual blow – she couldn’t lose her lover _and_ her line of work. Natasha is fascinated by dreams; she enjoys her job and she always has, loves the challenges and collaboration and problem-solving, but Wanda is an architect and for her, the dream is a _need_. 

For Natasha, it’s the psychology, but for Wanda, it’s the purity of creation – the cities and spires, the landscapes and lockboxes. She can execute designs that wouldn’t occur to anyone else and even if they did, would be too intimidated to build. Wanda is the most gifted architect in the business because Wanda _loves_ it; she’s more at home in the dream world than any of them. 

If she had lost that along with Vision, Natasha thinks they might have lost Wanda, too. 

But her subconscious, it seems, latched onto that fear and buffered it: the shade of Vision almost never speaks, just tags along as a quietly supportive presence. Natasha has never seen anything like it, the way he’s less a shade and more a projection. It’s heartbreaking, what it says about how Wanda saw their relationship – there was nothing left unsaid between them, no rage or recrimination, that what she is missing the most is just his presence, just the calm of it, the understanding that he was always there for her. And it can be uncomfortable sometimes, a version of Vision that feels vaguely servile, almost, even though Natasha knows that’s not quite the correct interpretation. 

Darcy winces at the explanation, but seems to understand that all things considered, Wanda could be much worse, and is probably better for the fact that Natasha has never left her alone.

Carol shows up just as Pepper’s carrying out a tray piled high with sandwiches, chicken and tuna salad, hummus and roasted red peppers – plenty of each made on everyone’s individual bread preferences, and Wanda catches Natasha’s eye over the food to see if that detail made them both reach the same conclusion. Natasha gives a subtle nod, then laughs at a joke Darcy makes as she selects two halves from the tray. 

Whatever this job is, it’s important to Pepper that they take it.

The details don’t come until they’ve moved inside, over coffee and cookies in the living room, and then Pepper is direct. “We found a way in to Thanos,” she says. 

For a long, long moment, they’re all silent. No one moves. Blinks. Breathes. They can’t, under the weight of it. The gravity pins them all in place. Natasha digs her ring into her palm, hard as she can, and twists, but the skin doesn’t split and no blood wells to the surface. Wanda’s hand, she can see, is tucked into her pocket, fiddling with her pen. 

Carol speaks first. “Finally. When do we start?”

“It’s not that easy,” Wanda says. 

“Like hell it’s not,” Carol says hotly. “We’re in, Pepper, lay it out.”

Wanda’s voice rises. “We’ve lost enough over this! It’s not an automatic opt-in!”

“Christ, Wanda, you of all people – ”

“Stop it,” Natasha says. It rings with authority and they both do stop it, instantly. Self-aware enough, she thinks, that at least they all know it’s not really each other they’re angry with, and she turns to Pepper, who looks deceptively calm even if her bloodless lips give her away. “What did you find?”

“The lead came from Peter,” Pepper says – that’s how they know it’s good, then. Not that Natasha had cause to doubt Pepper’s integrity, but she also knows how badly Pepper wants this, and if the lead came from Parker, it’s not a wild hope. “The Odinson Corporation sent an extractor into one of his daughters. They didn’t get what they were looking for, but they _did_ learn that his kids have turned on him. And one of them trained his subconscious security team.”

She pauses, and Darcy lets out a low whistle. “Which means…”

“Which means that if you forge the daughter believably, the militarized projections fall in line behind her long enough to buy you the time to find what you need,” Natasha says. They turn on you eventually; they always do, but if his daughter has gotten lax about training his subconscious – it’s a slim chance, but it’s still the biggest, most concrete shot they’ve ever had. 

Wanda turns to her. “You’re considering this?”

“How certain is Parker?” Natasha asks Pepper. 

“He was with the team that went in,” she says. “All grown up, can you believe it?”

Natasha taps her fingers against the arm of the couch. Vision went looking for a way into Thanos; he paid for it with his life, and it didn’t put them any closer. This, though. The beginnings of a plan are already starting to coagulate in her brain, liabilities, contingencies, and she stands before she can get lost in it. 

“Give me a minute,” she says. No one comes after her as she walks away, down the hall. She’s intending to go to the bathroom, splash some water on her face, examine her conscience and her own instincts, but she turns left instead of right and lets herself into Tony’s room. 

It’s been awhile since she’s visited, but nothing has changed. The room still smells medicinal, even with the window open to catch the warm breeze. Tony is asleep in his raised hospital bed, breathing steady and even. He’s wearing sharply ironed pajamas and his hands rest on top of the blankets, pale and still. 

He’s been shaved recently. She’s still not used to seeing him without his goatee, though she’s gotten used to all the rest of it, the heart monitor and the catheter and the feeding tubes, the soft hum of the machinery performing all his bodily functions for him as he sleeps. Two years to adjust to the waxy pallor of his skin and how still and quiet he is when Tony, more than anyone she knows, had always been so vibrant and full of life, boisterous, talkative, clever. Tony Stark was an absolute fucking charm bomb. Natasha loved him for it as much as she’d sometimes wanted to throttle him for it. She takes one of his hands between both of hers.

Thanos trapped him here, trapped him in limbo and then left him, had one of his colleagues sever the PASIV. He rode his own kick up and left Tony down below. Genius, almost, trapping someone in his own subconscious – Natasha could admire the creativity if it wasn’t so fucking evil. 

Two years asleep in this bed. Natasha has deliberately not allowed herself to do the math on how many years Tony’s mind has spent alone in limbo, raw dreamspace, because she doesn’t want to understand the scope.

They can’t wake him here on his own, not without getting into Thanos’s mind and reconnecting the two of them – here in this room, Tony can’t actively dream. They would only be trapped with him, no way for a kick, even a synchronized kick, to reach that far below. And there is no guarantee that even if they can finally wake Tony up, his brain won’t be a ruined mess. There’s no reason to believe otherwise, except for the fact that Natasha knows Tony Stark and she has every reason to believe if anyone could keep himself occupied for endless decades on creation and cleverness, it would be him. 

If they go in, they’re taking an enormous risk for a very slim chance it would make any difference at all, but he would come after her. He would come after any of them.

He is the best extractor she’s ever met, and even he couldn’t close every job; the nature of their business lends itself to spotty track records, but between Tony’s talents and the team he put together, they had higher numbers than most. She had been a brilliant forger, and has since learned she’s not a bad extractor herself – well above average, she knows, but she’s not at his level. 

Which means if they’re going to pull this off, she needs a point man she can lean on, and the only person she would trust with this job isn’t exactly going to be thrilled to see her.

She lifts Tony’s hand to her lips and presses a kiss to his knuckles.

* * *

Natasha leaves Pepper to find them a new workspace, the rest of the team to start scouting their individual needs, and charters a flight to New York. The plane lands in the early hours; she’s not tired and there’s time to kill, so she walks around Brooklyn and observes the way the city wakes itself up.

She hasn’t been back in a year, which simultaneously feels like an eon and not very long at all. Natasha never really thought of it as _her_ neighborhood, even if her passport and driver’s license and voting record said otherwise. Brooklyn always belonged to Steve and since she had no strong feelings about any particular city, she’d been more than happy to live somewhere that felt like home to him. 

Still, it’s all achingly familiar, the streets and the sounds. She stops into a pie café for breakfast and is surprised to learn she remembers the cashier. For a moment, she thinks about ordering a second round, taking the to-go bag to sit on the stoop of their old building and wait to catch Steve as he leaves for the day. Maybe he’d thaw from knowing she ordered sour cherry for herself and banana cream for him, and the gesture would be enough to make everything okay again. 

Or his new girlfriend might be the first one out, and Natasha very much does not want to think about Steve fucking someone else in the bed they used to share. 

Instead, she hops the subway into Manhattan and goes to wait in his office at the college. She’s not sure why that feels less aggressive, exactly, but if she’ll be unwelcome either way, she’d rather feel unwelcome here than her home. In his office, it’ll feel more like a business deal instead of what it is. 

It’s a cramped little room but it’s neat, papers arranged on the desk in perfect symmetrical order around a boxy laptop that’s seen better years. There’s a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade, a mug full of soft graphite pencils, a stack of legal pads, and a photograph of a woman with waved brown hair and very red lips. Natasha stares at it for a long time and tries to feel nothing; she’s here for Tony, for justice or vengeance, it doesn’t really matter which, but it was easier before she had a face to put to the name.

The doorknob turns, and she realizes that she’s smiling even though it’s not a nice smile. 

Steve, as predicted, doesn’t look thrilled to see her. “By all means, make yourself comfortable.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” she says, toasting him with her disposable coffee cup. She has her feet up on his desk and deliberately wore her deadliest pair of heels; if it made the morning’s walk a nightmare, it’s worth it for the moment his eyes flit to her bare legs before he remembers he’s not supposed to notice. Steve always loved her in heels.

He shuts the door behind him. “What do you want, Natasha?”

She wants to tug on that electric cord of attraction that’s always been there between them and is even now thrumming back to life in this small office, sparking up and oblivious to his cold reception and her deliberate antagonism. She wants to part her thighs and raise an eyebrow, see if he’d fall to his knees and bury his face between them because Steve never could resist a challenge, a dare, a chance to do the stupid thing. The odds, she thinks, are more even than he would ever allow himself to believe.

“There’s a job,” she says, and sets her feet back on the floor, legs hidden under his desk. 

Steve is already shaking his head. “You’re wasting your time,” he tells her, sounding exhausted. “I’m out.”

“And yet you’re still teaching dream exploration to the impressionable youth of NYU.”

“I teach _ethical exploration_ , and you know that,” he says. “There are all kinds of legitimate therapeutic applications – all the breakthroughs in PTSD treatment in the last few years – ”

“Is this how darling perfect Penny thinks you’ve spent your pre-Penny life? Just a good old therapeutic extractor?” 

“You know her name is Peggy.”

“Oopsie.” 

They never should have fallen in love; Natasha had known from the beginning what a bad match they were. He’s too earnest by half, always willing to get his hands dirty but never relishing the prospect, and when he and Tony first started working together – well, Steve has a wild streak in him, a need to _prove_ something, plus a love for the craft, but it was also because he had needed the money too badly to let his better angels shout down his demons. His mother was sick, his student loans were paralyzing, and by the time his mother had died and he could buy a Brooklyn brownstone with cash, loyalty had set in. He was always there to be sure that if they skirted legality, they never ruined anyone’s life and they never left a trace.

Natasha does this because she likes it and she’s good at it. For her, it’s never been complicated.

They were a bad match, but after their first shared dreaming exercise – five minutes asleep, an hour in the dream – Tony had pulled her aside. 

“Is this going to be a problem?” he asked her, point blank. The grin that spread over her face in response had felt slow and sweet, like a spill of honey. 

“Yes,” she told him, locking eyes with Steve over his shoulder. He stared right back, intrigued and emboldened, and she had wondered, idly, how long it would be before they slept together. She didn’t think it would be very long. She had been right. “I think you should fire one of us right now.”

“I’m not joking, Romanoff.”

“Neither am I,” she said, meaning it. He should have. But he didn’t. And ten years on, Tony is trapped, Vision is dead, and Steve had begged her to give it up after Viz’s funeral, pleaded that they’d finally made an enormous enemy and it was time for them both to go straight. They could settle down, they could be happy doing something else.

She had called him a coward, accused him of wanting her to be someone other than who he’d always known she was, and the upshot of it all is that after weeks of ripping and shredding each other’s most vulnerable points at the worst possible time, now some person named _Peggy_ gets to use Natasha’s porcelain bathtub and walk-in closet while Natasha is left wearing an engagement ring for a marriage that is never going to happen.

“Look, whatever it is – ”

“It’s Tony,” she interrupts, and watches Steve’s face collapse. She and Steve are not the only ones who had left things on bad terms.

“Did he… I mean, is he…” He can’t fumble through it. 

“We have a shot at Thanos,” she says. “A real one. I can’t do it without you.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” he tells her, quiet, almost fond. 

“Is that a no?”

He looks at her, blue eyes sharp as ever. “Are you doing this to try and save Tony, or are you doing it to take a pound of flesh out of Thanos?”

Natasha considers. She supposes it says something about her that she hadn’t considered that question until now. “If we can pull Tony up, that’s the first priority,” she finally decides. “That’s what I care about most, but if Wanda has her own agenda, I’m not going to get in her way. I’m not even going to discourage her.”

“That’s fair,” Steve says. “Okay. Okay, Nat, I’m in.”

She didn’t realize how afraid she was that he would say no. She walks around from his desk and stretches out a hand to touch his face before she can think the better of it; he leans into the cup of her palm and curls his warm fingers around her wrist, as though the time between them is nothing at all. He’s shaved his beard; she misses it, but he looks good like this, too, clean-cut, at ease in his new life.

There’s an awkward moment when he eventually realizes she’s still wearing his diamond. He clears his throat and she steps back, putting space back between them. 

“I’ll have to wrap up some things, make a few excuses,” he says.

“That’s fine. Four hours enough?”

“I only need two,” he tells her.

* * *

Everyone is entirely too happy to have Steve back on the team. Darcy actually squeals with joy, an extremely out of character noise for someone whose default setting is _wry_ , and Wanda hugs him for so long that Natasha starts to feel slighted.

“Whose side are you on here?” she asks.

“I told you from the very beginning that you’re both too proud,” Wanda says. “Whose side am I supposed to be on if everyone’s an idiot?”

“Don’t sugarcoat it or anything.”

“No problem.”

They go to work in familiar rhythms: researching, rehearsing, scrapping it all and starting over. Steve gains Carol access to Thanos’s daughters and she studies their mannerisms and inflections, and no one gets too close to Darcy’s portable lab as she loses herself in her own world of compounds and reactions. Natasha and Steve agree that they’ll need to go three levels down, unstable but not undoable; they need to find Tony, but they also need to get out undetected and it’s easier at a greater depth. 

There isn’t much they _don’t_ agree on when it comes to the plan, because if the concept of extraction is part of what broke them, when it comes to the actual job, they’ve always worked brilliantly together and it’s a relief to learn that this time isn’t any different. 

But they’re also overly formal with each other, a strained sort of professional veneer that feels one poor word choice away from shattering entirely. One loose thread to pluck and they’d just be back at each other’s throats, jabbing at old scars and trying to decide once and for all which of them holds more blame for how they ended. Natasha’s jaw aches at night and every time, she promises herself she’ll stop clenching it, but it’s a pointless promise.

Steve touches the small of her back when she shows him the layout of the dental office where Thanos will be sedated for surgery, the best shot to make their move once they’ve bought the oral surgeon. It’s a gesture born out of reflex, his big hand spread familiarly just a few inches up from her ass, and she shakes him off so viciously that he nearly falls over. “Could you _not_ ,” she bites out. 

He spreads his hands with a sardonic twist in his mouth that doesn’t sit right on him. “Won’t happen again.”

“Good,” she says, and walks away from him to check in with Wanda. The first level she’s building is the lakehouse where Thanos likes to spend his summers, designed to lull him into security before they drop him down into the second, and every single detail has to be note-perfect. A risk right up front – building from reality always is – but a calculated one, because if it goes the way it should, it’s the only slice of the dream that will linger, and then it’ll dissolve in thousands of other hours spent on the lake, both real and imagined.

She links up to the PASIV and joins Wanda’s build – to get away from Steve for a few minutes, mostly, but she needs to give notes anyway, so two birds. The grass is a little too green, the cushions on the porch swing are off, but it’s coming together. Wanda’s outdone herself. By the time she finishes, it’ll be a masterpiece. 

They work late into the night. Eventually, Darcy peels off to hunt down pizza, and Wanda decides to join her. Natasha doesn’t realize Carol’s lagged behind until she kicks her ankle, lightly, under the table where she’s spread out all of her highlighted research. 

“You need cash for food?” Natasha says, looking up from a profile of Thanos’s favorite bodyguard. 

“I mean, I’ll _take_ cash, always,” Carol says. “But no. I drew the short straw for this conversation.”

Natasha closes the file. “That’s ominous.”

“Look, I’m too blunt to be good at this, but it’s not like Doc Lewis is better, so – if this job gets fucked because you and Steve refuse to sort your shit out, I don’t see a world where Pepper or Wanda will ever forgive you,” Carol says. 

“You’re right,” Natasha says. “You’re too blunt to be good at this.”

Carol makes an amused sort of snort. “I’m right about both parts, though.”

“You hear from your kid much these days, Carol? Does Monica ever answer the phone if Maria doesn’t force her to talk to you?”

“You can take as many cheap shots as you want and it’s not gonna make me wrong,” Carol says. “I’m not saying I don’t have my own shit. The difference is that mine isn’t going to pop up while we’re sedated and three levels deep. You don’t have to kiss and weep and set a new wedding date, but if you don’t at least bury the hatchet, you’re throwing an extra risk into a job that’s already more dangerous than we would have even considered in any other circumstance.”

She stands up and runs a hand through her spiky hair. “And if you bring up my ex-wife _or_ my kid again, I’m gonna take a swing at you. That was your only pass.”

“Take a twenty out of my purse,” Natasha tells her. “For dinner.”

“Help myself to a whole bunch of fifties, got it.”

It’s too quiet once Carol tags along after Wanda and Darcy. The warehouse is dark aside from little pools of lamplight. She leaves her worktable with the intention of switching on something brighter, but as her heels clack against the cement floor, she takes a turn and heads for the little room Steve’s claimed as his own, when he needs some private space to think through a problem. 

When she peers in the open door, she’s surprised to see that he’s linked to the PASIV, alone. One broad arm is stretched out with the cord laced through his fingers, his chin resting lightly on his chest as it rises and falls with his slow rhythmic breathing.

Neither of them can dream organically without it anymore, not for years. It never felt like much of a loss – how could she miss something she could never remember, never hold onto for longer than the time it took to get out of bed and into a shower? But she had wondered ever since they split if taking time away from shared dreaming had given Steve back the ability. If he sleeps easily again, next to Peggy.

Natasha can’t talk to him about anything besides the job here, not in reality. She’s too – what, exactly? Furious, grieving, brokenhearted? She had loved him so much. They were together so long and she never got tired of him, never got bored or complacent or took him for granted because being adored by Steve Rogers was not the sort of thing life cashed out to people like Natasha Romanoff. And now, she has no answers. She can’t separate anything into individual, easy-to-parse emotions. Does she want him back or just want him, and even then, is it only that her body remembers him and misses being touched? What’s real between them and what’s only imagined?

Does she still love him, or is it just that she never did learn how to lose a fight with anything resembling grace?

She does know one thing that’s true, though, and it’s that Carol’s right. They’ve lost too much already; if they can’t pull this off, that’s just how it goes sometimes, but if the reason they fail is Natasha’s stubbornness, she won’t be able to live with herself. 

He’s set the timer on the LED for five more minutes. She settles into the chair next to him and drops herself in.

* * *

Steve has built an elevator, the pockets of memory compartmentalized at each level, contained and organized. A shade of his mother is on one floor, Natasha knows; he didn’t mean to create her, but if a subconscious could be entirely controlled, there would be no such thing as an extractor. She’s well-contained, though, only comes through if he’s feeling _very_ lost, and Natasha doesn’t think she’ll find Steve with his mom.

She rides all the way to the top, figuring it’s a reasonable place to start, and the doors open onto their old workspace in Paris – years ago, before Morgan was born, before _everything_. They worked out of the top floor. The ceiling is glass, the sun is setting through it in a spectacular blaze, and Tony is kicked back in his old swivel chair in pinstripe pants and a button-down shirt rolled to his elbows. His hands are tucked behind his head as he surveys the cityscape below him, a king taking stock of his kingdom with satisfaction rolling off him in waves.

This is how Steve remembers him. 

It’s not what she came here for, but she steps off the elevator anyway, drawn towards this shade like she could warm her hands on him. Tony slowly swivels the chair and grins.

“Romanoff,” he drawls, pleased to see her. “These were the good times, yeah?”

“Yes,” she agrees. “The very best ones.”

“Rogers never wanted to admit how much he fucking loved it, but nights like this….” Tony says, and waggles his eyebrows. “After the money hit our accounts, if I’m not mistaken, he took you straight to the Mansart suite and spent a couple decadent hours licking champagne right off your tits.”

“I plead the fifth,” Natasha tells him, but this is Steve’s head, so it’s not as though he doesn’t already have all the details of that night, of all the others like it.

“To which part, the tits or the hypocrisy?”

“Steve isn’t a hypocrite.”

“No?” Tony looks interested. “You don’t think so, really? Because he _loves_ this, Romanoff, even then he was drowning himself in guilt over it. You know, he’s never figured out if he hates himself more because of how much fucking fun it is or because of how much he loved finally having his hands on some money. He wants _so much_ to be a good boy, and he’s just really not all that good, is he? You always gave him too much credit.”

“He never felt safe once, not in his whole life, before he met you,” she argues, something protective in her clawing its way to the surface. “It wasn’t just the money, this was – this was _home_.”

Tony looks unconvinced; then again, he would, wouldn’t he. “The Mansart,” he murmurs, mostly to himself. “He drew you naked on the terrace in the morning while you slept on the lounge, shining in the sun. Thought about how many nights he’d gone to bed hungry and freezing and now he had a favorite suite at the Paris Ritz.”

She backs away, back into the elevator, and Tony calls out to her before she goes. 

“You knew how much he loved it, though,” he says. “And you loved him anyway? That’s fucking crazy, Romanoff.”

 _This is your subconscious, Steve, so why don’t you tell me?_ she thinks, jabs at the button for another level, somewhere in the middle.

A living room, but she doesn’t recognize it. The glow of a TV illuminates the space; she can’t tell what’s on it, but she can see a woman sitting on the couch, with a blanket draped around her. Here is where she finds Steve, sitting at a scarred wooden table a few feet away, just out of the woman’s sight. 

He turns when he notices Natasha and nearly flinches. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Doing a last-minute check?”

“Trying to make sure nothing would come barreling through at an inopportune moment on the job,” he tells her. “It’s a little bit appalling that everything in here is so...”

“Compartmentalized?” Natasha suggests, and Steve almost smiles. “Don’t beat yourself up. It’s good tradecraft. Tony always said the best extraction teams are the ones where everybody’s self-aware.”

“Sometimes I wish I was less self-aware,” he sighs, looking at the projection of Peggy on the couch. She still hasn’t turned her head towards them, but it’s evident who she is and this is a memory he chews over often. 

“No, you don’t. You wish a lot of things but I know you don’t wish that.” She nods toward the couch, not wanting the answer and knowing it doesn’t matter, she still has to ask. “What’s the story here?”

“This is…” Steve says. He looks away from her. “Natasha. Please.”

“It can’t come bursting out in the middle of Thanos’s dentist appointment,” Natasha tells him, her throat aching. “We have to do this somewhere, Steve. We had to do it sometime.”

“It’s Peggy’s apartment and I’m grading papers, here at her table,” he says, slowly. “She’s watching TV, it’s getting late. We both have work in the morning. Earlier I set an automatic timer on her coffeemaker, to save us a couple minutes when we’re trying to get out the door. And then she – ”

Peggy laughs at something on the television, then turns to look at them over the back of the couch, smiling at them. A nice smile, warm and inviting. “What do you think?” she asks them, in her plummy accent. “Time to get ready for bed, or should I be very bad and watch one more?”

“And I know right then,” Steve says. “I know.”

Natasha looks down at her hand, ring twisted inward and a tiny spot of blood welling up in the center of her palm where the diamond rests against it. Wake up, she thinks, _wake up_ , but there’s not a kick to ride and there’s no quick way to die. There is nothing to do but stand it.

“You know that you love her, now,” she says. Her voice is hollow. She feels numb.

Steve looks away from the projection, startled from his reverie. “What?”

“That’s what you know, isn’t it?”

He looks like he’s trying to strangle the words inside him, as though he wants to keep them bottled up more than anything, but it’s no use. “This is what I always wanted, Natasha. It’s so normal here with her, do you see? Everything is steady. _Being bad_ is going to bed an hour later than normal because you found something fun to binge-watch. We get up at the same time every morning. I look at her, and she is – whip-smart, and she’s kind, and it’s all so very settled. I look at her and I know we can build a life right here. And I know right then that I don’t want to.”

Natasha digs the rings deeper into her palm, sharper, harder, it _stings_ as she stays silent. 

“And I know I’m going to regret this moment,” Steve says, staring at the still-smiling projection on the couch. She repeats herself, _should I be very bad and watch one more?_ “I know it’s not enough for me and I stopped being someone who belonged here a long time ago. I know I should end it with her and leave these papers on her table and hop a plane to Kyoto, because Wilson always said there was a spot for me on his team if I wanted it. I made a mistake and I don’t know how it happened, that making giant life decisions when you’re grieving is never a right turn, that you were awful and that I was awful and that I still want to come home.”

He looks at Natasha, now, as though he’s only just remembered that she’s here. 

“But I don’t do any of that. I join her on the couch and we watch her show.”

* * *

Natasha’s eyes open at the same time as Steve’s. She doesn’t know what to say; she also knows that right now, she is the one who has to say something, because she isn’t the one who cracked herself down to the bone.

There’s no question she needs to ask, that’s the thing. There’s no follow up, not a single point that she wants clarified.

 _Shame_ is what takes up the subconscious space inside Steve; if she’s always known it on some level, this is a different kind of knowing. It did not have to be extracted or hunted down, it is built and baked in, and he has not yet begin to figure out how to make peace with it.

For Natasha, it has always been pride. _If you don’t need me, I don’t need you_ , it’s her pride that stops her from showing any kernel of vulnerability. If there are so many times when it’s been enough to save her, it’s interfered in a thousand others. It is her ring, a diamond that helps her keep track of reality even at the same time as it makes her bleed.

If they were in her head, there would be a supermarket with an abandoned girl inside it, the slow realization that if she was going to survive, it would only ever be up to her. No space inside that market for shame, for guilt, but pride, that would grow to define her.

If there’s a move forward here, it’s hers.

She doesn’t know what to say, so she drops the cord and crawls onto his lap, straddling him with the flimsy aluminum recliner beneath him. It creaks under their combined weight. She wants to beat the shame out of him, grip it in both her hands, drag it into the daylight and stomp it out of existence for all the times it has taught him he should put up roadblocks between himself and the things he wants. 

“Why do you always need me to tell you?” Natasha asks. “Can’t you just look at my goddamn hand and let that be my answer?”

“Sometimes I need to hear it,” he says simply, lifting his hands to catch in her hair, twining and twisting and snarling. “Sometimes everyone needs to hear it.”

Her heart thunders in her chest. He waits, patient, steady.

“I’m sorry,” Natasha says. “I’m sorry. None of it meant that I didn’t love you and I can do a better job of listening when you’re trying to tell me –” and then Steve is crushing her mouth to his, because the rest of the promises she’d make him could never matter as much as how badly she wants to _try_ for him.

* * *

Deep inside Thanos’s subconscious, there is a jail with a single cell, the light inside of it dingy and weak. It sits at the center of a labyrinth made of shiny green hedges, twisting and climbing grotesquely towards the sky, overgrown with vines and thorns, but they have brought him all the way here.

When Natasha coaxes him forward, gently and subtly, he slides the enormous brass key he’s carried since the first level into the matching padlock. It turns with a creak, and when the door opens, a red bird goes streaking past them, flying out at such velocity that Natasha has to turn to Steve to confirm that it happened, someone else saw it, too. 

Steve nods.

Above them, the music cue starts to float through the air, Carol signaling that the kick is coming. They’ll know soon if Tony is waking in the adjoining room of the dental office, if it worked, if it was _enough_ , and Steve moves to set off the chargers that’ll break the ground beneath them. 

But Wanda steps forward, and Natasha lifts her hand, a wordless signal that she knows Steve will understand - _give her a minute_. 

“You locked something away,” Wanda tells Thanos. “Are you sure it should be empty?” 

“No,” Thanos agrees, and he steps inside the cage himself. He closes the door behind him, and it shuts with a resounding iron clang. 

Natasha looks at her, wordless. 

“You did say it was my masterpiece,” Wanda tells her, and just after Steve blows up the ground, Natasha can see that the ground the jail cell stands on is still and calm, impervious to anything that could bring him back to consciousness with them.

* * *

By the day of the wedding, Tony is able to stand up for short periods of time with the help of a walker. Physical therapy is a long road back, and he probably pushes himself too hard, but no one has the heart to tell him to take it easy.

Natasha is putting on her makeup in Morgan’s room when he comes in – without knocking, naturally, always so fucking certain of his welcome, but she smiles anyway, doesn’t see how she could help it. “Your daughter told me my dress needs more glitter,” she informs him. 

“And yet you remain almost entirely glitter-free, like her advice means nothing,” Tony says, and grins at her. He’s dapper and very dashing in the bespoke tux that Steve told him repeatedly was unnecessary for wedding taking place in his own backyard, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. “Since I’m officiating this thing for you two crazy kids, I wanted to know how you’d feel if I opened with a dirty limerick.”

“Murderous,” Natasha informs him, turning back to the mirror to outline her lips in a bright summer red. “But you’ll do whatever you want anyway, won’t you?”

“Always do,” Tony says. 

She checks the palm of her hand, diamond upside down, but there’s nothing there. The stone is warm from her skin because it’s not the first time today that she’s tested it. 

“Thank you,” he tells her, abruptly, and she turns from the mirror to look at him, the sudden serious cadence in his tone, the sincerity in his brown eyes. “There’s never going to be anything I can say that’s big enough, I know.”

“No,” she agrees, smiling. “But it’s still nice, sometimes, to get to hear it.”

**end.**

  
  
  



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